1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of remotely controlling a destination terminal from an originating terminal. The invention is particularly related, but in no way limited to, using improved session initiation protocol (SIP) to enable a caller to control an originating terminal.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The amount of control that an originating terminal has over a destination terminal has been very restricted. For example, when making an extremely urgent call to a busy destination terminal, the caller is unable to free up the busy destination terminal by causing the call that is currently in progress to be dropped. Also, the called party may have particular services set-up on his or her terminal and the calling party is unable to take these into account easily or to modify the set-up services. This is particularly problematic when a caller wishes to adapt his or her call as a result of taking the called party's terminal configuration into account. For example, a user may be accustomed to setting his or her terminal to ring three times before going to voice mail, during times when that user is resting. At other times, suppose that the user sets his or her terminal to ring five times before going to voice mail. The user's family members may wish only to make a call to the user when the user is not resting. However, this is not possible because callers are unable to take into account set-up configurations on the user's terminal.
Similarly, calling parties are unable to easily provide information to the called party and to cause the destination terminal to display or act upon this information. For example, a calling party may wish to provide information about his or her identity to the called party. In the past this has been done by associating each terminal with a particular user. However, this is problematic when users move about and use different terminals. Also, prior art systems which display the caller identity at the destination terminal are fixed systems. That is, the caller is unable to easily change or modify the manner in which the destination terminal displays or acts upon the identity information.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide a method of remotely controlling a destination terminal from an originating terminal, which overcomes or at least mitigates one or more of the problems noted above.